Google has published its latest monthly breakdown of platform usage, showing the proportion of active devices running each version of the Android OS.
The data was collected during a seven-day period ending on March 7, and for the third month in a row, they show big gains for Lollipop, but while Marshmallow has almost doubled in usage month-over-month, its actual growth was tiny, and still only around half that of Lollipop over the same period.
Google began its Android 6.0 Marshmallow rollout five months ago, but so far, only 2.3% of devices are now running that version. That's an increase of 1.1% compared with last month, when just 1.2% of active devices were running Marshmallow - but that's still rather poor given how long the latest version of the OS has been available.
| Version | Codename | API | Last month | This month | Change |
| 2.2 | Froyo | 8 | 0.1% | 0.1% | - |
| 2.3.3 - 2.3.7 | Gingerbread | 10 | 2.7% | 2.6% | -0.1% |
| 4.0.3 - 4.0.4 | Ice Cream Sandwich | 15 | 2.5% | 2.3% | -0.2% |
| 4.1.x | Jelly Bean | 16 | 8.8% | 8.1% | -0.7% |
| 4.2.x | 17 | 11.7% | 11.0% | -0.7% | |
| 4.3 | 18 | 3.4% | 3.2% | -0.2% | |
| 4.4 | KitKat | 19 | 35.5% | 34.3% | -1.2% |
| 5.0 | Lollipop | 21 | 17.0% | 16.9% | -0.1% |
| 5.1 | 22 | 17.1% | 19.2% | +2.1% | |
| 6.0 | Marshmallow | 23 | 1.2% | 2.3% | +1.1% |
Android 5.1 Lollipop, which was released over a year ago, saw the biggest growth during the last month, increasing its install base by 2.1% to 19.2%. The slightly older Android 5.0 declined very slightly by 0.1% to 16.9%, but combined with 5.1, Lollipop has finally become the most-used version of the OS at 36.1%, overtaking KitKat, which dropped by 1.2%.
It's worth noting that it's taken sixteen months - since Lollipop was first released - to finally overtake 4.4 KitKat, now on 34.3%, as the top Android version, almost two and a half years after KitKat first started to roll out.
All other versions of the OS also declined month-over-month, with the exception of 2.2 Froyo, which once again remains at 0.1%.
Significantly, these latest stats show that the rollout of Android 6.0 Marshmallow is now lagging far behind that of Lollipop's original deployment. Five months after its rollout began (and six months after its announcement), Android 5.0 Lollipop had reached 5.4% of active devices; now, at just 2.3%, Android 6.0 has less than half the percentage that its predecessor had amassed during the same amount of time - and even accounting for some growth in the total number of active Android devices, there's no disguising the fact that the Marshmallow rollout is going pretty badly.
Source: Android Developers
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